One day I woke up and realized I'm not a baby nurse anymore. I'm not even a young nurse. I'm a real adult who has now been doing this for years, and I'm definitely expected to know what I'm doing at all times. And that's fucking terrifying.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

The cost of night shift

Lots of people don't like working night shifts. It fecks* with your sleep pattern, makes you nocturnal, you miss out on brunch specials at the local diner because you're comatose in bed, and sometimes people mistake your pasty skin to mean you're a vampire.

But I love it. I love the night shift staff, I love the ability to sleep in until 11am and get away with it on any given day, I love the fact that EMS people bring us coffee at 0300 because they can.

There are, however, some things that make me wonder if I'm a little bit jacked in the head from working all these nights. Like this morning. I came home after a 4 day string of night shifts, and was seriously jonesing for some waffles. I'm bone tired and really want to go to bed...but those waffles need to come first.

There I was, standing at the counter with my waffle maker trying to stay awake. When they're done, I sit and begin to chow. A forkful is on the way to my mouth, when I notice a small piece of color on it - color that normally does not belong on a waffle. It's the same color as my scrubs. I eye it up. I could have reached my finger into the mess of syrup to pick that bad boy off. I could have set that bite aside and gotten the next one. I could...I could...but I didn't.

I am way too tired to get that piece of thread.

So I ate it.

Come to think of it, I'm not even sure it was thread. It might have been a small scrub-colored bug for all I know. Actually I hope it was a bug, because who knows what is on my scrubs after 12 hours in the ER. I barely slowed the fork down on the way to my mouth though so really it was a moot point. I don't think I could have stopped that trajectory even if I wanted to.

But whatevs. I don't even care. I was hungry. And now I'm full, and ten minutes from a carb coma, and I'm going to bed.

6 comments:

What the feck! Haha nice word, guess I should get use to the idea of the night shift because after I graduate, I'm sure I'll be working that shift anyway. If I were as tired as you, I'd probably eat that fuzz bunny too.

Feck off!! You're right - I'm loving this word! Another night shift lover here! I do my best nursing in the night and I have the most fun stories from nights. Once after a night shift, I ate a full Greek dinner before crashing from a food coma on the couch. It was awesome!

I (heart) night shifts as well: the people that work them, the lack of admins, the witching hours, the comedy that sleep-deprived delirium brings, the snacks...

I think my favorite part is enjoying the sunrise and the fact that I am going home to a warm bed while everyone else is STRESSED and on their way TO work while balancing their coffee and cell phones behind the wheel.

I kinda enjoy the brain-scramble as well when I get home. It's like a free buzz.

Feck. Agreed. I love the Irishisms. I was just thinking today, "I really hope that I will be able to import the phrase 'cop on' to Canada".

To 'cop on' is to 'get the drift. But you can say it in a harsher, more authoritative way, like, "Why didn't that mother COP ON and give her extremely FEBRILE child some tylenol??"

I love it too! It also helps that I've always been a night owl... I even got a tattoo that instead of "Carpe Diem" I got "Carpe Noctem" - yup, Seize the night =) (Along with the Rod of Asclepius/Greek symbol for medicine and an EKG line that flat-lines...as a reminder that u never know whats gunna happen)

-I once went out for a big awesome breakfast at a local truck stop with a couple other fellow night shifters, and then we went to the bar across the street from my old apartment, where I had a drink (at 0900) and promptly went home and passed out very happily. =) it was awesome.

So this one time I made a blogfriend who also likes beer, youtube videos of kittehs, facial hair, and the F word. Now Hood Nurse is a guest blogger on here! The internetz are funny like that sometimes.

140 characters of snark

DISCLAIMER

HIPAA. Trust and believe, these stories are halfway made-up and halfway made up of lots of other stories. I will protect patient privacy like it's my job. Because it is.

Most of the photos showing mundane things are ones I took. If not, they're from google search. Ain't no real patient pictures up here, folks.

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